Saturn was surrounded by “a thin, fl at ring, no-
where touching, and inclined to the ecliptic.” The
Italian-French astronomer Giovanni Cassini went
a step further in 1675 when he noticed a puzzling
slim, dark gap almost in the middle of the ring.
What appeared to be one ring turned out to be even
more complex. Astronomers now know that this
“ring” is actually made up of eight main rings and
thousands of other ringlets and divisions. Some ofIf someone asked you to draw a planet other than ours,
you would likely draw Saturn, and that is because of its rings. But for most
of history, human beings couldn’t see the rings. Not the astronomers of
ancient India, Egypt, Babylon or the Islamic world. Not Ptolemy or the
Greco-Romans, who nonetheless discerned that Saturn was farther from
Earth than Mercury or Venus. Not Nicolaus Copernicus, who showed that
the Earth was just another planet orbiting the Sun. And not even Tycho
Brahe, the Danish nobleman and alchemist, who attempted to calculate
Saturn’s diameter (he was way off).
It was Galileo Galilei who fi rst spotted something there. His primitive
telescope gave him only a slightly better view of the heavens than did the
naked eye, and in 1610 he thought he saw two undiscovered bodies fl ank-
ing Saturn, one on each side. “The fact is that the planet Saturn is not
one alone,” he wrote to a counselor of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, “but is
composed of three.” Two years later, though, with the rings tilted directly
toward the Sun edgewise and basically invisible from Earth, Galileo was
astonished to fi nd that the two mysterious compan-
ions were gone. “What is to be said concerning so
strange a metamorphosis?” he wondered.
The best minds of the 17th century came up with
all sorts of theories: Saturn was ellipsoidal, or sur-
rounded by vapors, or actually a spheroid with two
dark patches, or had a corona that rotated with
the planet. Then, in 1659, the Dutch astronomer
Christiaan Huygens fi rst made the suggestion that PP. 50-53: NASA (3); EVELYN HOCKSTEIN